Hybrid Genres

I'm the type of person who is impossible to pigeonhole. So it makes sense my books are hard to fit into any specific genre. Choosing a specific genre may seem limiting, but there is room for scope.

I wasn't a fan of Young Adult books when I was a young adult. I gravitated toward more adult fiction by Anne Rice and Clive Barker, and had the stomach for their concepts. But when I was writing, I tended to do realistic stories that rarely went in a horror or fantasy direction. When I'm asked what kind of genres I tend to be very vague and say “fantasy drama” or “fantasy horror”.

Into the Other was always intended as a fantasy novel, and it also fell within the realms of YA. It came out of an old novella I wrote for a competition towards the end of high school called Conditions Apply. I would see this phrase on so many commercials in fine print (including the company I now work for), and it inspired a story about a woman who had to give up her baby to a strange entity to avoid going to jail. It wasn't particularly brilliant, but I always had it in mind for a rewrite. When I revisited the story, I wanted to focus more on world building, so now the Other is far more detailed than it originally was. My main aim was to be as descriptive as possible without falling into the trap of long-winded passages with explicit detail. I certainly don't consider myself a fantasy writer, as I don't subscribe to the standard tropes within this genre.

Live to Tell is an entirely different story. I'm not a big reader of mystery or suspense books, so I feel like this is more an intense drama the likes of which you'd see on a TV crime show. It has elements of suspense and mystery, there's some amateur gumshoe moments where the protagonist, Stephen, is digging up research for his new book while inadvertently finding new clues to solve a crime, and getting himself embroiled in the dark underworld of kidnapping. I was inspired by TV shows like True Detective, and I felt I could give it a suspense/noir feel while still having very human and identifiable characters.